Literary Samplings

Outstanding interview with John Updike on PBS Newshour. Updike discusses his famous store A & P. Two great quotes: “Once you begin a gesture, it’s fatal not to go through with it.” And the final line: “His face was dark gray and his back stiff, as if he had just had an injection of iron, and my stomach kind of fell as I felt how hard the world was going to be to me from here on in.”

While I have nothing against Toni Morrison, it seems ridiculous that that she was selected for the Nobel Prize over the far more accomplished John Updike and J.C. Oates.

“Little by little, America has taken over world culture. American culture is all over. Blue jeans. Cigarettes. It’s too much. I think we should have the right to bad Spanish movies, not only bad American movies. I have nothing against blue jeans. I just don’t like them on everyone. It’s too disgusting.”

“I pity the French Cinema because it has no money. I pity the American Cinema because it has no ideas.”

“There is more to life than meditating on the strangeness of man.”

“All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl.”

“To me style is just the outside of content, and content the inside of style, like the outside and the inside of the human body. Both go together, they can’t be separated.”

“I don’t think you should feel about a film. You should feel about a woman, not a movie. You can’t kiss a movie.”

“A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end… but not necessarily in that order.”